Throwback Thursday: Ghostpoet 'Peanut Butter Blues and Melancholy Jam'

Image: Ghostpoet 

Catching the second half of Ghostpoet's set back in August at Leeds Festival, the Londoner is backed by a fully fledged live band chanelling his newly carved sound that's commandeered by a greater emphasis on guitar.

What's most striking is his final bow Liines, extracted from debut album Peanut Butter Blues and Melancholy Jam, belted out with impassioned intensity and fervour to really slap you in the face and set it apart personally from its preceding numbers.

It was a stern reminder of a performance in a dinghy Preston pub back in 2011 when he'd just broke ice with 'Cash and Carry Me Home', piecing together down-tempo trip hop like beats and stark observations of everyday life. 

Unbeknown to the crowd, Ghostpoet, real name Obaro Ejimiwe would deservedly reap a Mercury Prize nomination that year, in which he told the Guardian, "If I win the Mercury award my head will explode like a robot" on hearing the news.

The music he was making could no longer be ignored and the nomination leveraged his music onto a new level. He was operating on the peripheries of genre constraints, bridging the gap most notably between hip hop, electronica and grime.

The origins of the album appear rooted in grime with a longing to create something entirely eclectic and relatable, in 'Us Against Whatever' he verses "see clearer like the Eski Boy" and it's also documented that he started out in a grime collective when he was younger. 

The record was eventually eclipsed by PJ Harvey's Let England Shake, beating the likes of Adele, James Blake and Metronomy, but it was a remarkable feat for Obaro just to be included with his debut album and also paramount to his later success. 

The musical space in which he was operating was already picking up heat with the release of Massive Attack's Heligoland a year previous. The music Ghostpoet was creating was reminiscent of when Mike Skinner blurred the lines between UK garage and hip hop with true to life lyricism on Original Pirate Material; so likewise, it had appeal.

This had a similar USP, poignant tales of angst, the bleakness of the nine to five told in 'Us Against Whatever', messages of hope balanced with retrospective observations in 'Survive it' (below) and similar overcast themes running through delivered over a background of slow burning grooves, lucid keys and glitchy rhythms. 

While many of these themes and feelings of anxiousness still exist on his third LP Shedding Skin, in which he collaborates with the likes of Nadine Shah and Lucy Rose, the genetics of Peanut Butter Blues and Melancholy Jam paved the way for Ghostpoet to emerge triumphant, balancing an unclouded feeling of Britishness with a tapestry of newfangled beats to angle him where he is today.

It may not have bagged him a Mercury award back then, but he's progressed from an unknown quantity in no way less than any of his fellow shortlisted peers, and his debut album is still remembered vividly which always signals a formidable record.

Ghostpoet plays at The Institute in Birmingham on Tuesday 24th November